Tuesday, August 9, 2011

6 months until exams


“Why sholdestow my realtee oppresse? / The see may ebbe and flowen more or less; / The welkne hath might to shyne, reyne, or hayle; / Right so mot I kythen my brotelnesse. / In general, this reule may nat fayle” – Geoffrey Chaucer, “Fortune”

I'm finishing up course work this fall and plan to take my qualifying exams early next spring, so I've spent a lot of time this summer putting together my exam list. At Maryland, the examinees have the pleasure of putting together their own exam list (100-150 works with an emphasis on a period of literature and a secondary emphasis on a particular theme or genre). It's a terrific exercise and it's proving to be a very productive way of expanding my thinking.

My examination list centers on literary representations of the flow of energy from farm to fork through the foodways and foodsheds of late medieval and early modern England. I'm following the metamorphosis of farmed animals from livestock to meat to cooked meals to waste products, a process which weaves together natural and social systems to create complex landscapes of meaning. Literary conceptions of the foodshed in every genre transform an ecological concept into a social network heavily tilted toward the interests of anthropocentric institutions. How and where humans position themselves in relation to the natural world is of paramount interest in medieval and early modern literature and remains a profound concern today.

At the center of this discussion is the tension between the biosphere and the semiosphere. Like a larger nonhuman version of the foodshed, the biosphere is a network of energy which ebbs and flows with the forces of growth and decay. Although humans often perceive the existence of decay, suffering, and mutability as proof of a vindictive universe, the biosphere, like Chaucer’s Boethian Fortune, is entirely indifferent to humanity.

In contrast, the fundamental forces of human society (compassion, oppression, money, magic, language, politics, etc.) represent the specific interests of individuals and institutions as they attempt to harness the wild energy of the natural world. In the late medieval and early modern periods, diverse cognitive modalities such as poetry, philosophy, economics, and theology all position the human at the center the center of foodshed, suggesting all food energy is self-possessed as it flows instinctually ever-upward into our dining rooms.

During my time as an MA and PhD student, four plays have been central to my thinking about how foodsheds were depicted on the English stage: the Shepherds’ Plays and the Noah Plays of medieval drama, Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. Each of these plays takes up a different vantage point in the foodway to present its vision of the ecological network of human, nonhuman, and more-than-human. Each play begins with what could be called a “food problem” which must be resolved; the foodshed is in some form of disarray, but by the end of the play proper order is restored. These comedies are also unified by the attention they draw to the continuity of flesh found among farmed animals, laborers, and women.

Building on John Berger’s hypothesis that animals were our first metaphor, I wish to examine animal husbandry as what may be our first instance of organized ideological thinking. The bonds of domestication may have grown out of ecological relationships, but eventually, at some point in prehistory, the entire human landscape was reconfigured under the guise of a new, imaginary, largely anthropocentric vision of “nature.” This act of domestication, the restriction of what J.M. Coetzee’s avatar Elizabeth Costello calls “fullness of being,” is the substructure of many, if not all, ideologies of oppression.

Because the language of animality is so widespread, an examination of how this idea works its way into the literature of the late medieval and early modern will require focus. Beyond drama, my list emphasizes 1) the biblical, classical, and humanist texts which provide the basis for thinking about the foodshed in the late medieval and early modern period, 2) select contemporary writings about human relationships to food, animals, and agriculture found in manuals, satire, and pastoral literature, and 3) literature which is troubled by and attempts to resolve the problem of humanity’s own animality. My hope is that this course of study will produce a nuanced critique of the social grammar of subject-object/human-animal relations.

Rather than a fanciful call to return to an irrecoverable, utopian “Nature” of the past, this project looks forward to a posthumanist future. By embracing what Giorgio Agamben calls “the suspension of the suspension” between human and animal, posthumanism undercuts all systems of oppression and all ideological restrictions placed on “fullness of being.” We might then begin rehabilitating our ecological relationships within the biosphere and building a food system based on principles of justice for both human and nonhuman.

So what do I have on the list so far? I'm glad you asked! (And if you have suggestions ... by all means, share!)

Biblical sources: Genesis, Leviticus, the Pauline Letters

Classical sources: Aristotle, De Animalibus; Columella, De Agricultura; Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras; Juvenal, Sixteen Satires; Ovid, selections from Metarmorphoses, Fasti, and the erotic poems; Petronius, Satyricon; Theocritus, Idylls; Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics.

Medieval Drama: The Noah Plays; the Cain and Abel Plays; the Shepherds Plays; the Offering of the Magi Plays; the Last Supper Plays; Mankind; the Digby Mary Magdalene; the Croxton Play of the Sacrament; "Robin Hood and the Friar" and "Robin Hood and the Potter"

Medieval anonymous political poetry, satire, lyrics, ballads: Wynnere and Wastoure, Man in the Moon; Song of the Husbandmen; Mum and the Sothsegger; King Edward and the Shepherd; John the Reeve; Tournament of Tottenham; The Hunttyng of the Hare; Parlement of the Thre Ages; Dives and Pauper; The Harley Lyrics

All the theologians whose name begins with "A" who wrote about animals: Albertus Magnus, Ambrose, Aquinas, Augustine.

Chaucer, Tales from the Miller, Reeve, Wife of Bath, Summoner, Clerk, Merchant, Shipman, Franklin, Nun's Priest, and Manciple. (Oh why don't I just go ahead and say all of them.) The Parliament of Fowls and "The Complaint of Mars," "To Rosemounde," "The Former Age," and "Fortune" too.

John Gower, Vox Clamantis and selections from Confessio Amantis; Robert Henryson, Sheep and Dog; the Jack Upland poems; William Langland, Piers Plowman; Lydgate's The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man and St. Edmund.

The Lais of Marie de France; the Pearl Poet's Sir Gawain, Cleanness, and Patience; selections from saints lives, the asceticism of the saints, and encounters with holy animals; John Skeltton's "Mannerly Margery, Milk and Ale" and "Philip Sparrow."

Early Modern Drama: Gammer Gurton's Needle; Arden of Faversham; Chapman et al, Eastward Ho; Thomas Dekker, The Shoemakers Holiday; John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess; John Ford, Tis a Pity She's a Whore; Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; Ben Jonson, Every Man In His Humour, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair, and Volpone; John Lyly, Endymion; Philip Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts; John Middleton, A Mad World, My Masters, The Bloody Banquet, and Michaelmas Term; William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, Coriolanus, King Lear, 1 Henry IV, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, Two Gentleman of Verona

And other assorted early modern literature: William Baldwin, Beware the Cat; Giordano Bruno, Heroic Frenzies; Margaret Cavendish, Blazing World and Sociable Letters; Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method; Master Fitzherbert, The Boke of Husbandry; George Gascoigne, The Noble Arte of Venerie; Aemelia Lanyer, "Description of Cookham" (and other country house poems).

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Lycidas; Thomas Moffett, Health's Improvement; Michel de Montaigne, Essais; Thomas More, Utopia; Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel; Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, Complaints, Mutability Cantos; Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosegay and Will and Testament; Thomas Wyatt.

And lastly, the theory: Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer and The Open Atterton and Calarco's Animal Philosophy; Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast; John Berger, "Why Look at Animals?"; Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste; Matthew Calarco, Zoographies; Jacques Derrida "Eating Well" and The Animal That Therefore I Am; Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents; Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals; Donna Haraway, When Species Meet; Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked; Louis Marin, Food for Thought; Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World; Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites; Raymond Williams, The Country and the City.

No comments:

Post a Comment